Sophie Thompson

Brought up backstage

Thompson’s is a fascinating presence to be in. She is paradoxical: instantly recognisable, but also sort of anonymous; bringing vast range to roles that have spanned musical theatre (she got her first of six Olivier nominations for the ridiculously difficult role of Amy in the Sam Mendes’ production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company in 1996), classic films like Four Weddings and a Funeral and soaps from Coronation Street to Casualty, while always tingeing her performances with an edge of oddness and eccentricity.

Case in point: as I enter the huge rehearsal room at the Dominion Theatre in the West End, far across on the other side of the room she is crouching low against the wall with her back to me. She turns and stands up, eyes wide and mouth full. “Sorry, I was just trying to sneak a bit of toast before you arrived.” There’s an earnestness to everything that she says, sometimes a flicker of mischief, and her quiet, breathy voice occasionally resolves into a joyful foghorn of a laugh.

The theatre world was never alien to Thompson. Her father Eric Thompson was an actor, theatre director and creator of the English version of The Magic Roundabout; her mother is the renowned actor Phyllida Law, and Sophie grew up in the dressing rooms of West End houses.

“I loved being in theatres as a kid. That’s where my mum and dad worked. Those were buildings that were familiar to me and held great solace and comfort for me. I liked the haunting element of them, the darkness and the oddness and the maverick mix of ages and characters that were allowed to be there together. That made sense to me.”

‘Backstage is the place I feel comfortable. The upstairs bit freaks me out’

Thompson would often tag along to performances in the evenings. “I remember very vividly being backstage with my mum at the Palladium when she was doing La Cage aux Folles. There were quite a lot of blokes in frocks just wandering in. I used to tidy up her dressing table because she was very messy.”

It was the upstairs/downstairs nature of the place that held allure: the glamour of front of house with red velvet seats and gilded edges, versus the grotty, mouse-ridden backstage areas. 

That aspect at least, she explains, hasn’t changed. “At the Old Vic, we turned up to do the tech for Present Laughter in 2019. Indira Varma and I were sharing a dressing room and there was this really terrible smell. We were scrambling about underneath all the furniture and eventually found a mouse in the coolant of the little fridge. It had just got in the back and died.”

There was also the time she found a poo in a drawer in a Bristol dressing room – “A great big job. I just thought: ‘How did that happen?’” – but it’s that juxtaposition that she loves. “Downstairs is the place I feel comfortable. The upstairs bit freaks me out.”

On the road to Walford – via a few weddings

From a young age, being in and around so many theatres and actors, Thompson knew it was what she wanted to do. She started to take classes with a local woman called Sheila who would gather a group of young people in her north London kitchen to teach them drama.

She instantly felt like she belonged. But Thompson was “very, very shy and awkward” and realised even as a child that if she was going to make it in the world of performance – a world that she loved – she had to give herself a talking to.

“There used to be these books with a character called Bobby Brewster. He spoke to different parts of his body. It was the same as when my dad used to talk to ‘Fred’ who “watered the irises in our eyes when we were crying”. Bobby Brewster was the first recognition I had that you were in charge of your own vehicle. So I told myself I had to join in. I knew I belonged here, and I had to make the most of it.”

From that point, Thompson sought out every drama club she could find. At one point she saw a sign outside a school advertising a weekly group. She went for six months until they found out that she wasn’t even a student at the school. 

Meanwhile, at her own school, she was miserable. Not even the fact that she had been on TV at the age of 15 and kissed a boy on screen gave her enough cachet to be cool. She spent most of her time crying in the toilet, she says, only enjoying English and art, and frustrated at the lack of opportunity for drama.

“It makes me mad thinking about the educational system and the way that we marginalise the arts in schools. I think it’s genuinely unhealthy and profoundly misguided and it makes me rage. Hopefully we’ve learned from the pandemic that the way that we make sense of the world and the way that we heal and the way we connect is through collective experiences – singing, dancing, playing, all these things that we missed so sorely – and maybe that will get addressed in the education system. Maybe the very strict Victorian system will be unpicked in some way.”

Thompson escaped school as soon as she could, leaving at 16 and telling her parents she wanted to act. Keen to nurture a skill to fall back on, they signed her up for a two-week cookery course in Notting Hill, which has latterly given her something of a parallel career, having won Celebrity Masterchef in 2014 then publishing a cookbook the following year.

But thanks to that small role in a TV drama at the age of 15, Thompson had managed to get hold of an Equity card, allowing her to take on professional theatre roles. A few jobs followed – including that stint in Manchester with Routledge – and eventually she joined Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

In her second year at Bristol, her dad died. “I was broken,” she says. Thompson was only 20, her dad only 53. The effect on her was devastating. She moved back to London to be closer to her mum and her sister, fellow actor Emma Thompson.

‘On Four Weddings I just remember sitting in churches for hours on end, laughing and chatting with David Haig. I was there in a wedding dress wondering if I would ever get married’

She took a steady job in a recast of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, although it proved to be a fraught experience. “Tom came in to note the one scene that I was in. I was doing too much. Let’s just say it. And Tom was appalled. He came in to tell me to stop, and it was very frightening and I cried in the toilet for at least three hours. It was up there with Patricia Routledge, only without the shower cap.”

Thompson has encountered other titans in her career. In 1996, Mendes cast her in the Donmar’s production of Sondheim’s Company, his strange, sublime concept musical about marriage. Thompson played Amy, a bride-to-be with cold feet, whose patter song Getting Married Today is one of the most fiendish in all musical theatre.

“But I had never done a musical. It’s a terrible admission but I wasn’t very familiar with his work. It was mind-boggling, learning that part. I remember trying to learn it all in the car up to Scotland with the kids.”

“Bobby!” Thompson shrieks, emulating the disjointed opening number of the musical. “‘Bobby, baby! Bobby!’ My poor ex-husband. That was probably one of the elements that drove him away.”

Sondheim came in very briefly when they were rehearsing. “We were all absolutely shitting ourselves, but he was lovely. Not verbose at all.”

Around the same time, her film career had a massive boost with the release of Richard Curtis’ Four Weddings and a Funeral, in which she played Lydia, the bride at the second wedding. “I just remember sitting in churches for hours on end, laughing and chatting with David Haig. I was there in a wedding dress wondering if I would ever get married.”

Thompson says that even the runaway success of Four Weddings and a Funeral and subsequent hits including Emma, Persuasion and Gosford Park didn’t bring the kind of fame that got her stopped in supermarkets. “I’ve always managed to cunningly keep a low profile.”

However, a high-profile moment came in 2006 when she joined the cast of EastEnders in one of its great storylines. Thompson played Stella Crawford, girlfriend of Phil Mitchell, who physically and mentally abuses his young son Ben. The performance was all the more chilling for the lightness with which Thompson played it. 

Was it as harrowing to play as it was to watch? “Well, me and Ben really got on. We tried to have a laugh, we ate lots of sweets and I felt very protective of him.”

More recently, in 2018, she became one of few EastEnders actors to also appear in Coronation Street, as medium Rosemary Piper. And the following year brought her last stage outing in the phenomenal Present Laughter at the Old Vic just before... “Let’s not say the P-word,” Thompson grimaces.

Q&A Sophie Thompson

What was your first non-theatre job? 
Working in my uncle James’ cafe in Scotland. 

What was your first professional theatre job? 
Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Schoolmistress at the Royal Exchange, Manchester.

What is your next job?
I very rarely have a clue.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
Don’t melt stinky cheese in the green room microwave.

Who or what is your biggest influence? 
My sons – before that, I was in love with a variety of cartoon characters, Eric Morecambe and Margaret Rutherford.

If you hadn’t been an actor, what would you have been? 
I’d have had a proper cafe with stonking baked tatties or a market garden – or both.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals? 
I try to avoid superstitions – but I am partial to a ritual. I can’t possibly divulge.

Discovering bean bags with Bennett

During the P-word, Thompson moved house, making endless trips in a Transit van between north and east London. “I got back on my bike too. I made trips down to the river, on to the beach, I pretended I was a mudlarker. Moving house felt like a cathartic thing to do.”

Despite a few moments when Thompson has wondered whether to continue with acting, this time at least the lure of Adrian Scarborough and Alan Bennett has proved too much. Scarborough has adapted a strange novella by Bennett called The Clothes They Stood Up In. Although it is Scarborough’s adaptation, Bennett has been involved from a distance. “Honestly, I don’t know where Bennett ends and Scarb begins,” says Thompson. 

‘During the pandemic, I made trips down to the river, on to the beach, I pretended I was a mudlarker’

In the play, a stagnant, middle-aged couple return home from the opera one night to find the entire contents of their flat have disappeared, including the casserole that was in the oven. We follow Mr Ransome – who Scarborough also plays – and Thompson’s Mrs Ransome as they get used to a new life without possessions.

Thompson’s character discovers exciting things like sweet potatoes, bean bags and passionate sex. It’s a decent bit of Bennett, plumbing the strange, repressed depths of quiet people, and another coup for Nottingham Playhouse, which has bounded out of the Covid lockdowns with an impressive programme of in-house productions, including Stiles and Drewe’s new musical Identical.

Scarborough and director Adam Penford are quietly setting up the rehearsal space behind us now, as our conversation comes to an end. It’s clear that Thompson is excited to return to the stage, and to a short run out of London, a situation that she hasn’t been in since those early days in digs, with her newly gotten Equity card and Routledge’s shower cap. “I can’t wait to see what it feels like again.”

CV Sophie Thompson

Born: 1962, London
Training: Bristol Old Vic Theatre School
Landmark productions: 
Theatre
• Hamlet, tour (1988)
• Company, Donmar Warehouse, London (1996)
• Into the Woods, Donmar Warehouse (1998)
• Clybourne Park, Royal Court, London (2010)
• Guys and Dolls, Chichester Festival Theatre (2014)
• The Importance of Being Earnest, Vaudeville Theatre, London (2018)
TV
• EastEnders (2006-07)
Film
• Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
Awards 
• Clarence Derwent award for best supporting female for Company, 1997
• Olivier award for best actress in a musical for Into the Woods, 1999
• Inside Soap Best Bitch award for EastEnders, 2007
• WhatsOnStage award for best supporting actress in a play for Present Laughter, 2020
Agent: Independent Talent

The Clothes They Stood Up In is at Nottingham Playhouse until October 1. nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk